Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Winds of Winter

If there is one thing here that totally drives me crazy it is the winds we get between November and January. Years ago they bothered me because at that time my home was surrounded by trees. The winds were less fierce because of all the forest, but I always worried a tree would come crashing on the house.

Later the forest across the street was clear cut opening a wind channel that took out all my trees. Now my house is totally in the open with no wind protection. I joke and say that we are so open that if a duck farts on the Lewis and Clark River, we can feel the breeze.

One good thing about all the trees being gone is that we used to have day long power outages a couple times every year during every storm. Our power is more reliable now, though we were without power for about an hour on Sunday morning at around 5:30am.

Learning from the December 2007 storm I have done my best to wind proof everything, yet in the last week I lost a section of roofing above the tack room and oddly even though I used Simpson hurricane ties on the roof joists of the manure shed, two panels and the joists they were attached to were ripped clean from the shed. The Simpson ties snapped off.

When we first moved here to tornado alley, we lived in a mobile home and I was scared spitless. Then one day we had a tornado that missed my house completely but destroyed my camper shell laying in the back yard. I quit worrying after that. And now that we live in a house that desperately needs a new roof, every place around us gets theirs torn up by the wind but mine stays firmly attached. The wind is fickle and favors me not.

At one time I was managing and living in a club in the country. The building had iron bars in all the windows that were set in concrete. A tornado got so close that the bars wear humming. I had a huge pile of aluminum cans on one side of the building and a garbage can full of empty 1/2 gallon bottles on the same side but on the opposite end. The next day the garbage can was on it's side a couple of 100 feet from the building with bottles everywhere. The pile of aluminum cans wasn't touched. LOL...talk about hairs standing up straight on the back of your neck.

Donna, I don't think of your place as a trailer. It's a modular. Trailers still have wheels attached. Though, like trailers they depreciate in value as they age, but you should weather the wind like any other house if it is physically attached to a foundation.

Tango, You don't often get high winds in VA do you? Where were the humming bars? What state. All my years in New Jersey I remember only one really bad wind storm.

We had a pretty fierce wind storm hit here last weekend. Being in a big bowl we sometimes get wind events exploding down on us when the rest of the state is just a little windy. Last year I watched a wind burst take a brand new gazebo straight up in the air over a two story house, play with it a little while then drop it in the middle of a pasture about 100ft from where it started. It was probably in the air at least five minutes, if not more.